Experts Question Value of New National Tests

Beyond the political turmoil buffeting President Clinton's plan for
new voluntary national tests for students, experts are raising concerns
about the proposed exams' value as assessments.

Will the 4th grade reading and 8th grade math tests, as the
administration argues, help improve classroom practices and student
learning? Or will they, as some experts fear, prove useless or have
unintended negative consequences?

"There is a whole history of trying to use tests to change
curricula, and the record there is not particularly sterling," said
H.D. Hoover, the director of the Iowa Basic Skills Testing Program at
the University of Iowa.

Much about what the annual tests, scheduled to be given for the
first time in 1999, will look like is still uncertain. A national panel
this month is supposed to approve recommendations for test items.

The recommendations will then be forwarded to Riverside Publishing
in Itasca, Ill., which will create the reading test, and Harcourt Brace
Educational Measurement in San Antonio, which will write the math
test.

The companies were named by the Department of Education last month
as two in a multifirm alliance to receive a $13 million contract for
the first year of the planned five-year testing project. American
Institutes for Research, a nonprofit corporation based in Washington,
will oversee the contract.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress have vowed to pick up
where they left off before the summer recess to try to cut off funding
for the creation of the tests, which have come under fire from both the
political right and left since President Clinton announced the plan in
his State of the Union Address in February.

Now, some test experts are raising another set of issues, such as
whether the new national tests will offer any advantage over existing
commercially available basic-skills tests and whether they might
inadvertently wreck the longstanding National Assessment of Educational
Progress.

Some educators also worry about how the test results might be used
for punishing students or rewarding teachers.

In short, how much can be gained through the tests and at what
price?

One Among Many

One of the most basic questions being weighed by assessment experts
is whether the new tests will provide more or better information than
that gleaned from other tests designed to evaluate individual
students.

"I don't know myself what difference there is going to be between it
and a good standardized off-the-shelf test," said George F. Madaus, a
professor of education and public policy at Boston College's school of
education.

Several such tests are available nationally that yield individual
results, including the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the Stanford
Achievement Test, and the California Achievement Test, Mr. Hoover of
the Iowa test pointed out.

"If students currently take something like ITBS or Stanford or
California," he said, "there is no new information that people are
going to get [from the national tests] that they don't already
get."

Others argue, however, that the new tests will be an improvement
over commercial multiple-choice tests because half the time students
spend on the national tests is to be on items that require them to
write out answers. That activity, they say, is a more meaningful method
of assessment.

Other experts, meanwhile, are unimpressed by the Education
Department's argument that the tests will report student scores in
terms of NAEP achievement levels: basic, proficient, and advanced. More
than one labeled those levels "arbitrary."

Appealing to Some

But the national tests appeal to officials in Kentucky, one of just
six states to sign on to the initiative so far and a state considered
to be a leader--at least until recently--in implementing new assessment systems. ("Kentucky's Student-Assessment Director To
Leave Post," in This Week's News.)

In part, the tests answer the call of parents and others who want to
see how individual students stack up against national benchmarks, said
state schools Superintendent Wilmer S. Cody. They also fit the state
legislation that calls for state tests that are like NAEP, he said.
"It's a better mousetrap."

Eyeing the Stakes

Supporters of the new tests hope they will help hold states and
schools to higher academic standards than they may set for themselves
now. Boosters are counting on parallel changes in the kinds of lessons
students get in class.

Some educators and assessment researchers are skeptical, though,
about whether the tests will improve classroom practice and student
learning in a substantial and meaningful way that helps students think
better in the long term, once the tests are behind them.

Lyle V. Jones, a research professor in the psychology department at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he fears efforts
to recast classroom curricula will focus simply on teaching what will
likely produce higher scores on the national tests.

"The pressures to teach what is being tested are bound to be very
large and hard to resist," he said.

"Particularly in schools where the teachers and principals know the
results will be published, the focus will be on getting kids to perform
well on the test rather than meeting a richer set of standards in
mathematics learning," Mr. Jones said.

Such an outcome may be especially likely, experts say, if there are
significant consequences--what educators call "high stakes"--associated
with test performance, such as promotion to the next grade or bonus pay
for teachers.

"My real concerns," Mr. Madaus of Boston College said, "are around
the uses to which the results will be put.

"Clinton made reference to ending social promotion in the same
breath as talking about this test," he said.

"You could infer this was to be used as a [gatekeeping] kind of
effort" so that 4th and 8th graders don't advance if they don't do well
on the national tests, he said.

That's why Lorrie A. Shepard, the interim dean of the education
school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the Education
Department ought to forbid high-stakes uses of the tests or lay out
ground rules for those uses to assure that teachers have been trained
to teach what is on the tests and students have had an opportunity to
learn it.

In Maryland, one of the half-dozen states that have agreed to give
the national tests, an education official said he would be surprised if
schools used the new tests for student promotion or retention.

What's more likely to happen in his state, said Ronald A. Peiffer,
an assistant state superintendent, is that a community will hold a
school accountable for the results.

Because Maryland's innovative state assessment system was designed
to transform pedagogy and curriculum, it encourages teaching with the
state test in mind.

Mr. Cody also expressed doubt that the national test would be turned
into a high-stakes instrument in Kentucky because the current practice
there is to issue rewards and sanctions based on the performance of
whole schools, not individual students.

A Threat to NAEP?

Experts also say they are apprehensive that the introduction of the
new tests could harm the "gold standard" status of the National
Assessment of Educational Progress.

The tests are to be based on NAEP, with the new reading and math
exams using the same framework as the national assessment.

The existing assessment, which is also a project of the Education
Department, is mandated by Congress and has been given since 1969.

It is the only ongoing, nationally representative assessment of U.S.
student performance in core academic subjects.

Participation is voluntary, but most states take part in both the
testing leading to a national score and that yielding state-by-state
performance rankings.

NAEP is prohibited from providing results for individual
students.

The new tests will measure individual students' achievement in
comparison with that of states, the nation, and--in the case of
math--other countries.

Testing experts--even those who disparage the national assessment's
achievement levels--point to NAEP's positive features, such as its
nearly 30 years of trend data and its political credibility.

NAEP's design is also a strong point, they argue, because it covers
a wide spectrum of what students should know and be able to do in a
given subject.

A sampling of students takes different parts of the NAEP tests; no
one student sees the whole scope of the multihour exam. Some worry that
the shorter, 90-minute length and smaller scope will make the new
national tests less solid.

At least in 4th grade reading and 8th grade math, Ms. Shepard said,
the new tests will come into direct competition with NAEP.

Indeed, NAEP is scheduled to measure national and state-level
performance in 4th grade reading in 1998 and 8th grade math in
2000.

Because of the time, effort, and expense involved, "I can't imagine
that people [in states] would want to do both," she said.

States do not pay for the state NAEP exams themselves, but must
provide employees to distribute, administer, and collect the tests.

For the new national tests, the Education Department plans to pay
for states and districts to take part in the first year of testing, but
it has made no commitment beyond that.

"One thing that will clearly happen," Ms. Sheppard predicted, is
that "the national assessment will stop collecting information at the
state level."

At that point, she said, "the trend lines stop, and the value of the
state assessment is now up for grabs."

Mr. Peiffer said Maryland would be reluctant to give up the NAEP
trend data. "It would still be of use to us," he said, "for making
improvements, marking our progress."

Voluntary National
Tests. This Web site from the U.S. Department of Education explains
this initiative, and provides draft materials on both the the 4th grade
reading test and 8th grade math test.

Read United States Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley's April 29, 1997, testimony before
the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and Families on
voluntary national tests for reading and math.

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.